Canceling the Tokyo Olympics may be the safest option to prevent the spread of COVID-19, scientists say in a new report after analyzing the International Olympic Committee's guidelines about the disease.
"We believe the IOC’s determination to proceed with the Olympic Games is not informed by the best scientific evidence," the five scientists write for The New England Journal of Medicine. "The playbooks maintain that athletes participate at their own risk while failing both to distinguish the various levels of risk faced by athletes and to recognize the limitations of measures such as temperature screenings and face coverings."
Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and one of the article's writers, said Wednesday on CNN's "New Day" that there will be 15,000 athletes and support members from more than 200 countries coming into Japan, but COVID-19 vaccines are either not available or aren't being used.
Further, in more than 100 countries, the vaccines have not yet been approved for people who are younger than 18 years of age, Osterholm said, but many athletes are younger than that.
Osterholm noted that aerosols play an important role in the spread of the coronavirus, but there has been no planning made for hospital rooms, about where people will eat or travel, and what kind of respiratory protection they'll have
"What we're calling for is really an emergency review of all the recommendations that have been made," Osterholm told CNN.
Osterholm said he wants to give the Games a chance, as everyone wants the good news from the Olympics, but he also thinks the approach being taken by the IOC is "virtually a dangerous one if they don't change many of the recommendations they have, and for how they're going to protect athletes and their support team members. I think this is a real challenge."
The report was released while Japan is in a state of emergency, with nearly 70,000 active cases of COVID-19 and only about 5% of the population having gotten vaccines, reports Axios.
However, the scientists write in their report that the IOC has not issued safety guidance concerning indoor and outdoor events, or even with high-contact and low-contact sports.
Further, athletes must bring their own masks, the IOC is providing insufficient detail about the frequency of tests and hotel isolation, and athletes will have limited insurance coverage if they contract COVID-19 during training and competition periods, the report says.
The scientists said they want the World Health Organization to form an emergency advisory committee, such as it did in 2016 when there was a public health emergency with the Zika virus during the Olympic Games in Brazil. Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper, a sponsor of the Tokyo Games, said in an editorial that the IOC and the nation's government "cannot think it's rational to host the Olympics in the city this summer" because of the dangers of COVID-19, reports The Associated Press.
"Distrust and backlash against the reckless national government, Tokyo government, and stakeholders in the Olympics are nothing but escalating," the editorial added. "We demand Prime Minister (Yoshihide) Suga to calmly evaluate the circumstances and decide the cancellation of the summer event."
Meanwhile, the United States' vaccination program has been a "major success," but there are still several places where immunization levels are still a problem, Osterholm told CNN Wednesday.
"We're not done with this yet," said Osterholm. "I believe we've taken off the table the idea of some kind of surge like we've seen in India, but we're still not done with this virus in the United States."